macOS Application bundles - suitability for specific app distribution scenario

[scov]

Hello,

Let me apologize in advance for what may be a quite naive/uninformed first post; new to OS X and I'm getting lost in the various deployment-related challenges on this platform.

Scenario: looking to deploy a self-hosted OS X application that will be compatible with OS X 10.9 and above. From my understanding, the easiest way to accomplish this is to use an App Bundle, instead of Installer Packages.

However, at times, we push updates down the line, either to the executable itself, or the application's resources (this happens on other platforms). I'm looking to reproduce the same behavior pattern on OS X.

This means that:
1. my bundle should basically include two Apps - an "updater" that checks for these updates, downloads them and selectively overwrites some files;
2. the App "per-se", that will be launched by the former.

I wonder if the above can be accomplished using this Application bundles / I'm off the mark / over-complicating things. Thank you.

 

[hokan]

I seem to recall that the Sparkle framework (http://sparkle-project.org/) is a fairly common update solution when not distributing via the App Store. The source code is available on Github (https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle) so you could always take a look and see how they did it.

 

[scov]

Thank you. I'll take a look at it.

The software I'm working on is written in Java, then compiled to native code through Excelsior. I'll check and see if there's any limitation I may hit because of that.